Adelaide Business Debt Consolidation and Refinance

Adelaide's northern suburbs were built around volume car manufacturing, and when that ended a great many capable engineering businesses had to find something else to make. Many of them did. Defence and shipbuilding at Osborne, space and advanced manufacturing, medical devices and health research, and food and beverage processing that draws on the wine and produce regions surrounding the city.

Reinvention is expensive. New tooling, new certifications, new customers with long qualification periods, and often new premises. Where that transition was funded properly it worked. Where it was funded out of the GST account and a couple of unsecured facilities, the business can be technically successful and financially strangled at the same time. That is a large share of the Adelaide files we see.

The food and beverage side has its own rhythm. Wine, grain, seafood and horticulture all put money out well before they bring it back, and processors and distributors pay on terms that extend the cycle further. A profitable producer can be short of cash for most of a year, which is a working capital problem rather than a trading one and should be funded accordingly.

RevenueSA administers payroll tax, land tax and duty in South Australia. Land tax aggregation is a recurring source of unpleasant surprises for Adelaide owners who hold property across several entities or trusts, because holdings can be assessed together rather than separately. An assessment can arrive that bears no resemblance to what was budgeted.

Whether an assessment is correct is a question for your accountant or a registered tax agent, and it is worth asking properly rather than paying by reflex. Where it is correct and it is unaffordable, lenders generally treat it much like an ATO arrear: part of the total to be cleared at settlement, subject to security and servicing.

The same applies to payroll tax where a business has grown across the border into Victoria or New South Wales. Wages can be apportioned or grouped between jurisdictions in ways nobody intended when the structure was set up, and the assessment often arrives long after the wages were paid. Map it with your accountant before it becomes an arrears position rather than afterwards.

Adelaide metropolitan property is well accepted by lenders on the panel, and long-held family homes in the established suburbs frequently carry more usable equity than the owner expects. Owner-occupied industrial and warehouse premises through the northern and western suburbs are also viable security, which is worth exploring before the family home is offered up.

• Established metropolitan housing, the most straightforward security to place
• Owner-occupied commercial and industrial premises, which keep the home out of the structure
• Investment property, assessed on rent, exposure and the lender's policy
• Vineyard, orchard and larger rural holdings, which usually belong with an agribusiness or specialist lender

For growers and producers, water entitlements, plantings and processing infrastructure form part of the value and part of the assessment. Have the detail ready rather than let it emerge during a valuation, because incomplete information tends to be treated conservatively.